All too real: race thinking and thinking about race in post-1994 South Africa

The project is to work towards completion of a book under the working title of ‘All too real: race thinking and thinking about race in South Africa’. The data has been collected and the arguments developed and tested over years of teaching, researching and publishing, individually or in collaboration. While the transition to a democratic society in South Africa in 1994 marked fundamental changes from the apartheid order on many level, especially the political, on other levels there have been disturbing continuities, with consequences the potential of which are not often fully acknowledged or debated. It is the continuity of ‘race’, as a sense-making notion and as the sine qua non of race-based redress, that is explored in the book. What are the reasons for such continuities, and what are the intended or unintended consequences of making all citizens also specimens of (race) categories, as Zygmunt Bauman put it?